Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Contributors
- Introduction
- Theorising Identity
- Gender and Sexuality
- 4 ‘Manly, True and White’: Masculine Identity and Australian Socialism
- 5 ‘Stirring Tales’: Australian Feminism and National Identity, 1900–40
- 6 The Making of an Australian Civic Identity: The Bodies of Men and the Memory of War
- 7 (Homo) sexual Identities, Queer Theory and Politics
- Race, Place and Citizenship
- Culture: Literature and Film
- References
- Index
5 - ‘Stirring Tales’: Australian Feminism and National Identity, 1900–40
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Contributors
- Introduction
- Theorising Identity
- Gender and Sexuality
- 4 ‘Manly, True and White’: Masculine Identity and Australian Socialism
- 5 ‘Stirring Tales’: Australian Feminism and National Identity, 1900–40
- 6 The Making of an Australian Civic Identity: The Bodies of Men and the Memory of War
- 7 (Homo) sexual Identities, Queer Theory and Politics
- Race, Place and Citizenship
- Culture: Literature and Film
- References
- Index
Summary
Children of a foreign soil – daughters of a different race, but sisters in a common cause we have assembled here in the capital of a great country. Let all of us remember these days with pleasure (Friedland 1902).
In 1924 leading Australian feminist Bessie Rischbieth (1924) wrote to Carrie Chapman Catt, president of the International Women's Suffrage Alliance: ‘Australia offers such tremendous possibilities: it is the youngest of the great continents in developement [sic] and a comparatively small population makes it possible to sow the seed now of the sort of civilisation women of all countries dream about’. ‘Feminist campaigns’, Maggie Humm (1992: 7) has observed, ‘are inevitably shaped by national priorities and national polities’. Feminist ideology and practice have also been shaped, as Vron Ware (1992: 119) has argued, by the ‘social, economic and political forces of imperialism’ within which much nation-making has taken place.
Feminist aspirations, as Bessie Rischbieth's early identification made clear, have often been complicit with nationalist agendas and conceits (see also Humm 1992: 6). But feminism as a movement concerned with the rights and status of women across cultures, as a ‘radical movement that can unite women across existing divisions of class, race and culture’ (Ware 1992: xvii) is also, as the opening tribute by Sofja Livorna Friedland suggests, an internationalist force, comprising an alliance and perspective capable of disrupting and challenging racial barriers and nationalist exclusions.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Politics of Identity in Australia , pp. 78 - 91Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1997
- 1
- Cited by